Perry questions CO2's role in accelerating climate change

FILE -- Emissions from the Kentucky Utilities coal-fired Ghent Generating Station in Ghent, Ky., June 2, 2014. The U.S. has emitted more planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country, and now, it may be walking back a promise to lower emissions if President Donald Trump decides to abandoned the 195-nation agreement on climate change reached in Paris in 2015. (Luke Sharrett/The New York Times) less

FILE -- Emissions from the Kentucky Utilities coal-fired Ghent Generating Station in Ghent, Ky., June 2, 2014. The U.S. has emitted more planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country, ... more

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Monday questioned one of the fundamental tenets of climate change, that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are accelerating global warming.

Speaking on cable business network CNBC, Perry said carbon dioxide emissions are not the "primary control knob" of rising temperatures around the globe, but rather it's "the ocean waters and this environment we live in."

"The idea the science is somehow settled, and if you don't believe it's settled you're somehow or another a Neanderthal, that is so inappropriate from my perspective," he said. "If you're going to be a wise intellectual person, being a skeptic about some of these issues is quite all right."

In its most recent report, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 scientists from around the world, concluded there's a better than 95 percent chance that human-produced greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, have caused "much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years," NASA says on its website.

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Perry's comments came a few weeks after President Donald Trump said he would take the United States out of the international climate accord known as the Paris agreement. Perry, during the televised opening of a Cabinet meeting, later said that he believed the United States would remain a leader in efforts to slow climate change.

While still governor of Texas, Perry authored a book in which he called climate change a, "contrived, phony mess." Perry has softened since then, telling a Senate panel during his confirmation earlier this year, "I believe the climate is changing. I believe some of it is naturally occurring, but some of it is also caused by man-made activity."

Monday's statements did not conflict with that testimony. Rather, Perry downplayed the role humans are having on the climate, casting measures like a carbon tax as seemingly less necessary.

"The fact is, this shouldn't be a debate about is the climate changing. Is man having an effect on it? Yeah, we are," Perry said on CNBC. "The question should be just how much and what are the policy changes we need to make to affect that."

Perry's comments drew attacks from environmental groups, which called the former Texas governor a "climate denier."

"Rick Perry's outrageous comments are the latest indication that this administration will do everything in its power to put polluter profits ahead of science and public health," Sierra Club Climate Policy Director Liz Perera said.